Shifting sexual roles at the turn of the century

March 09, 2003|By Katrin Schultheiss. Katrin Schultheiss is an associate professor of history and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France

By Mary Louise Roberts

University of Chicago Press, 304 pages, $35

The French have long prided themselves on their staunch affirmation of the value of gender difference. Although the word "feminism" itself was coined in France in the 1880s, most self-identified feminists of late 19th and early 20th Century France shied away from the more militant and egalitarian strands of Anglo-American feminism. Despite the efforts of a relatively small contingent of suffragists, French women did not gain the right to vote until 1944, decades after their counterparts in the United Kingdom, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland and the U.S. Even politically progressive French women and men insisted that the sexes had fundamentally different social, political and moral roles to play, roles that were better understood as complementary than as equal.

Yet reluctance to embrace fully the more radical methods and individualistic goals of the Anglo-American women's rights movement did not mean that French society was impervious to change. As historian Mary Louise Roberts shows in her fascinating new book, "Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siecle France," the figure of the modern, emancipated New Woman burst onto the French scene in the last decades of the 19th Century. Critics from across the political spectrum alleged that the New Woman's disregard for gender norms threatened the very fabric of French society by encouraging self-indulgence, ambition and the abandonment of domestic and maternal duties. Widely regarded as Anglo-American imports, new women and feminists (with whom they were often confused) were frequently caricatured in newspapers, magazines and even novels as "whores, bluestockings, or desiccated old maids." By the turn of the century, Roberts observes, the term Nouvelle Femme "had become easy shorthand for a manly, man-hating woman."

Eager to dissociate themselves from these stereotypes, some new women chose to rename themselves eclaireuses, or enlighteners, stressing their simultaneous embrace of independence and their enjoyment of "beauty and charm, romance and sexual pleasure." Feminism, these women maintained, should be "visible and attractive." "Disruptive Acts" focuses on the public lives of a small group of eclaireuses who were actresses, journalists, or both, including Marguerite Durand, Severine (Caroline Remy), Gyp (Gabrielle Marie-Antoinette de Riquetti de Mirabeau) and Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts argues that the fin-de-siecle stage and newsroom provided ideal settings for the French New Woman's particular form of rebellion because they were "marked by the same kind of disruptive play with old conventions and gender roles." Both exposed the contradictions of a dominant liberal ideology that stressed individual self-fulfillment for men but equated true womanhood with domesticity and maternity. In the theater and the newsroom, Roberts maintains, women were free from conventional femininity, and yet in both settings they could--and did--play at femininity. Actresses regularly "acted out" femininity, thus exposing "natural womanhood" as nothing more than a role "rehearsed to perfection." Similarly, female journalists, especially those associated with the all-female daily newspaper La Fronde, played up their "feminine charms" while claiming their right to report on political events. "By pretending to be a traditional woman when clearly she was not," Roberts asserts, "a frondeuse exposed the norm for what it really was: a role, not a destiny."

No one embodies this penchant for playing at femininity better than Marguerite Durand, founder and editor of La Fronde. Renowned for her beauty and her feminism, Durand had a successful early stage career until her short-lived marriage to a politician. Durand soon shifted her attention to politics and journalism, though she continued to make occasional stage appearances. In 1896, Durand, then a journalist for the daily newspaper Le Figaro, publicly declared herself a feminist, and a year later she founded La Fronde, the first French daily written, edited and even printed exclusively by women.

From the start, La Fronde (named after the mid-17th Century noble uprising against the monarchy) defied easy categorization as either feminine or feminist. Essays praising women's traditional roles as mother, wife, housekeeper and charity worker appeared next to hard-hitting articles on working-women's lives, rendering the paper, in Roberts' words, "culturally illegible." The journalists themselves similarly eschewed easy labeling. Durand took great pains to dress fashionably and decorate the paper's office attractively while spearheading an effort to organize the country's first women's typographical union. For Durand, feminism "was a political enterprise that . . . was advanced by conventional feminine wiles." As Durand herself noted famously, "Feminism owes a great deal to my blond hair."